The Moving Menagerie

In a matter of weeks, my husband and I will pack up everything but our winter clothes and park ourselves in Los Angeles until next spring. My husband has business there; I am merely a camp follower. It is a sign of some special and strange quality of my life that the first question people ask when hearing this news isn’t, “How do you feel about moving to L.A.?” or “How will your son like living there?” but, “Oh my god, what about the chickens?” This is a problem of my own making, so I accept it. The fact is the question of what will become of my various animals is probably the subject most on my mind these days.

Some of those questions are easily answered. The cattle, for instance, will stay in New York, with our house-sitters. (But really, wouldn’t it be totally awesome to have twelve Black Angus in a Los Angeles backyard?) The ducks and turkeys and guinea fowl, who need more space than we have in California, will stay, although I sure would like to bring them. (What an icebreaker at neighborhood get-togethers!) The dog, of course, will come with us. Funny how moments like this draw the line between animals that are more connected to the landscape (cattle, for instance) than to the humans who own them, versus those animals (dogs) that are extended family members. You would no sooner leave a dog behind with a caretaker than you would leave one of your kids. The cats and the chickens, though, do sort of straddle that line.

Re: chickens. It is legal to have them in Los Angeles, as long as they’re a polite distance from your neighbors; and there’s a lively L.A. chicken scene already in place (I already have my Los Angeles Urban Chicken Enthusiasts T-shirt, courtesy of one of the members.) But our backyard in California is small. Moreover, there are zillions of coyotes and bobcats hanging out in the neighborhood, and they are not the scrawny East Coast models: like everyone in Los Angeles, the coyotes I’ve seen there look like they work out a lot with personal trainers. The idea of putting a coyote magnet in the backyard, someplace where the coyotes can bench-press four hundred pounds, is terrifying. At least for the moment, the chickens will stay here.

And what about the cats? Even though I still don’t understand cats—to me, they’re like foreign-exchange students here for the semester—we now have three of them, and I’m very attached to them. There’s Gary, a little female barn cat who we adopted when she was tiny; Leo, a tawny-colored male who we got from a local shelter; and Mittens, the stray I’ve written about here, who is now fully vested as a family member. The three of them are used to coming in and out as they please, which in Los Angeles means they would be a snack-size serving for a coyote in no time. (Isn’t it weird that moving from rural upstate New York to the center of the nation’s second-largest city means having MORE predator issues rather than fewer?). Cats in Los Angeles, in other words, are either indoor cats or they’re goners. Can we convince these cats that being outside these past few years was a big mistake? How will they react to that? Late at night, I picture us in our small house in Los Angeles with the three cats hurling themselves against the windows, yowling. This is when I take a sleep aid. We have talked about taking just one of the cats—maybe whichever seems the most adaptable to indoor life. That would be Mittens, because he’s old and lazy. On the other hand, Leo has a heart problem, so maybe we should take him instead, to be sure he’s being doted on. But that would leave Gary and Mittens here in New York together, and they hate each other. We could take—oh, never mind. This is the sort of thing that I suspect we will decide in the very last minute, because if you love animals and have to leave them, even for a little while, there’s no simple way to figure it out.

Photograph by Susan Orlean.

Susan Orlean began contributing articles to The New Yorker in 1987, and became a staff writer in 1992.